sweetly folded hands--surely the most wonderful hands ever
painted--while the polished floor, comforting couches and open fireplace
proclaimed this apartment as the composition of refined people.

I am alive to the harmonies of domestic interiors, and I sensed the
dissonance in the lives of these two.

Soon we three warmed the cold air of restraint and fell to discussing
life, art, literature, friends, and even ourselves. I could not withhold
my admiration for Ellenora's cleverness. She was transposed to a coarser
key, and there was a suggestion of the overblown in her figure; but her
tongue was sharp, and she wore the air of a woman who was mistress of
her mansion. Presently Arthur relapsed into silence, lounged and smoked
in the corner, while Mrs. Vibert expounded her ideas of literary form,
and finally confessed that she had given up the notion of a novel.

"You see, the novel is overdone to-day. The short story ended with de
Maupassant. The only hope we have, we few who take our art seriously, is
to compress the short story within a page and distil into it the vivid
impression of a moment, a lifetime, an eternity." She looked
intellectually triumphant. I interposed a mild objection.

"This form, my dear lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of
expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought
to believe that Milton could have compressed 'Paradise Lost' within a
sonnet."

"Then all the worse for Milton," she tartly replied. "Look at the Chopin
prelude. Will you contradict me if I say that in one prelude this
composer crowds the experience of a lifetime? When he expands his idea
into the sonata form how diffuse, how garrulous he becomes!"

I ventured to remark that Chopin had no special talent for the sonata
form.

"The sonata form is dead," the lady asserted. "Am I not right, Arthur?"

"Yes, my dear," came from Arthur. I fully understood his depression.

"No," she continued, magnificently, "it is this blind adherence to older
forms that crushes all originality to-day. There is Arthur with his
sonata form--as if Wagner did not create his own form!"

"But I am no Wagner," interrupted her husband.

"Indeed, you are not," said Mrs. Vibert rather viciously. "If you were
we wouldn't be in Harlem. You men to-day lack the initiative. The way
must be shown you by woman; yes, by poor, crushed woman--woman who has
no originality according to your Schopenhauer; woman whose sensations